Abdullah Bozkurt/Stockholm
Turkish intelligence agency MIT abducted Iranian dissident journalist Mohammad Bagher Moradi (36) in Ankara, tortured him during months of secret detention, and handed him over to Iranian security operatives in an illegal rendition operation, according to allegations detailed in a court ruling reviewed by Nordic Monitor and accounts given by his lawyer.
Moradi’s father challenged the operation before Turkey’s Constitutional Court, a government-controlled court that has often shielded the country’s intelligence agency from meaningful accountability. The court dismissed his complaints on procedural grounds, leaving MIT’s role in the abduction and rendition unexamined.
The July 22, 2026, ruling nonetheless put key evidence in the public record. Prosecutors received Moradi’s firsthand account of being seized by men wearing police vests, blindfolded, confined to a basement cell and beaten. Immigration officials confirmed that no deportation order had been issued. Salih Efe, the family’s lawyer in Turkey, separately told the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) that MIT had held and abused Moradi before he resurfaced in Iranian custody. Efe further said he suspected other Iranian political refugees had been secretly returned from Turkey.
In a January 4, 2023, letter from Tehran’s Evin Prison, Moradi said men wearing police vests stopped his car as he was driving home, forced him into their vehicle and took him blindfolded to a basement. He said his captors held him in a small cell, denied him contact with his family or lawyer, beat him and forced him to stand for days. During interrogations, he said, they tried to force him to make a false confession.
On February 7, his father, Mohsen Moradi, gave Ankara prosecutors a Turkish translation of the Persian-language letter and a translated record of a January 28 call between his son and his lawyer. The ruling says the call contained similar allegations. The court’s summary of the letter describes the captors as unidentified. The explicit accusation against MIT appears in a separate criminal complaint filed by Moradi’s father on December 22, 2022. He said his son had called from Iran on November 8 and alleged that MIT had abducted him, tortured him during the first three days and held him in secret for months before sending him to Iran.
Lawyer Efe told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) that Moradi had been held for about five months before he was transferred to Iran. In a separate interview with the CPJ, Efe identified MIT as the agency that initially held and abused him. RFE/RL reported that Moradi was in the custody of the intelligence branch of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and had called his family on November 4.
Moradi left his residential compound at 9:19 p.m. on May 30, 2022. Security cameras showed his car at a business from 10:34 p.m. to 11:02 p.m. A friend told police that Moradi dropped him off at home at about 11:10 p.m. The last recorded signal from Moradi’s phone came at 11:45 p.m., about a kilometer from where investigators found his car the next morning. The letter put the interception at about 10:30 p.m., earlier than the friend’s account would suggest. The ruling leaves the discrepancy unresolved.
Investigators failed to obtain public and private camera footage along possible routes or examine vehicle movements near the locations of the last signal and the abandoned car. The police file said footage from the area where the car was found could not be obtained, without explaining why and what had been done to locate it.
Investigators’ failure to pursue surveillance footage from homes and businesses near the suspected abduction site and along possible routes through neighboring areas fits a familiar pattern in cases linked to Turkish intelligence agency MIT. A series of such abductions was documented during the tenure of Hakan Fidan, a pro-Iranian Islamist who ran MIT for 13 years before taking office as foreign minister on June 5, 2023.
Rights monitors have documented dozens of reported abductions targeting people associated with the dissident Gülen movement. In several cases, men were snatched off the street in black Volkswagen Transporter vans. Some later testified that they had been held in secret detention sites and tortured for periods ranging from days to months before being handed over to police. Testimony and other evidence linked MIT to some of these operations, yet Turkish authorities failed to conduct any investigation in documented cases.
One of those cases is that of Yusuf Bilge Tunç, who disappeared in Ankara in August 2019 in a suspected enforced disappearance. His fate and whereabouts remain unknown.
Turkish prosecutors also failed to verify Moradi’s detention in Iran through judicial or diplomatic channels and made no attempt to obtain his testimony through judicial assistance, which is highly odd. As a result Turkish authorities violated Article 17(3) of the constitution, which mandates an investigation into any credible allegations of ill-treatment.
Turkey’s Constitutional Court shielded the country’s intelligence agency, MIT, from judicial scrutiny by dismissing on procedural grounds the complaints filed by Mohammad Bagher Moradi’s father over the Iranian journalist’s alleged abduction, torture and rendition to Iran:
Moradi came to Turkey in July 2014. The country granted him conditional refugee status on April 15, 2022, 45 days before he disappeared. According to letters submitted to the Turkish Parliament, he was threatened by a man identified only by the initials S.A.Ş., who was allegedly working for MIT. The journalist himself identified him on his clubhouse social media account as a man who threatened him and said if anything happened to him, S.A.Ş. would be responsible. No investigation into S.A.Ş. was initiated.
The court record contains no entry documenting his departure from Turkey after that date. The Ankara Provincial Directorate of Migration Management told prosecutors it had taken no administrative action to deport him.
The absence of a deportation order, along with Moradi’s account and his subsequent appearance in Iranian custody, confirms a transfer outside the ordinary removal process. Article 4 of Turkey’s Law No. 6458 bars the return of a person to a place where they would face torture or other prohibited ill-treatment, or where their life or freedom would be threatened on grounds including political opinion.
Moradi’s father reported him missing on May 31, 2022. He initially suspected Iranian intelligence. In July, while his son was still missing, he asked prosecutors to examine surveillance footage, interview witnesses and check bank records. He also reported a threat that his son had attributed to a man the family suspected of links to Turkish intelligence. Prosecutors interviewed the man, who denied the allegations and said he had last seen Moradi in 2018.
The December complaint accusing MIT prompted a separate investigation. On September 13, 2023, prosecutors declined to proceed with the complaint against public officials under Law No. 4483, citing insufficient evidence to bring a prosecution. In other words, prosecutors protected Turkish intelligence from any criminal investigation. In the original disappearance investigation, prosecutors issued a standing search order on January 19, 2024, for unidentified suspects in connection with unlawful deprivation of liberty.
The Constitutional Court followed the prosecutors’ lead, declining to examine the allegations against MIT. The majority ruled that Moradi’s father lacked standing to bring the complaints on his son’s behalf. Moradi’s July 2023 request to join the first case, backed by a power of attorney certified by the Turkish Embassy in Tehran, did not convince the court otherwise. The court could have easily allowed the case to proceed, citing uncertainty over Moradi’s ability to communicate freely from Iranian custody and his subsequent attempt to join the proceedings.
Moradi had worked as a freelance journalist for Iranian exile outlets, including Amad News. A 2013 prosecution in Iran had resulted in a five-year prison sentence. After his return, he began serving that sentence and was convicted on further charges related to his political and media activities.
The government also faced questions in parliament over Moradi’s disappearance. On December 14, 2022, a lawmaker submitted a written question to the speaker’s office asking then-interior minister Süleyman Soylu whether his ministry knew that Moradi had allegedly been held in secret and whether it had opened an investigation. The lawmaker said the ministry had left an earlier question, submitted in June, unanswered despite parliament’s 15-day deadline for written replies. Both questions fell on deaf ears, and the government has never responded. The ministry’s silence left allegations of MIT’s involvement in the journalist’s abduction and rendition publicly unchallenged by the government.
With the complaint against public officials closed and the Constitutional Court challenge dismissed, the case illustrates how Turkey’s intelligence agency, a key instrument of repression under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, continues to operate with impunity. Over the past decade, credible allegations that MIT abducted government opponents and critics and carried out secret renditions involving Iranian and Turkish dissidents have gone without thorough investigation. Victims and their families have been left without an authoritative account of abuses allegedly committed by state officials.
The Erdoğan government left two parliamentary questions about Moradi’s case unanswered. Both were submitted to the speaker’s office in 2022, and parliamentary rules required a written reply within 15 days:
